The future of gaming is 4K, not coming soon

We spent quite some time talking with a few Nvidia executives including Scott Herkelman, General Manager GeForce GTX, and we came to learn an easy and obvious answer to what Nvidia sees as the future of gaming.

It is 4K resolution that will look great on a big monitor. This is the next big thing that still needs some polishing but it is happening as we speak. Nvidia is working with a few developers including the guys behind Assassins Creed in order to bring 4K resolution textures into it.

You need a 4K capable monitor first and you will need two cards to power something like that GTX 780 class or higher but it can be done, even with existing hardware. It is supposed to look very great, unfortunately we hadn’t had a chance to see it but we can imagine that bringing the 4K resolution textures will make games look even better.

The big issue that needs to be solved is how do you tackle storage and distribute these big textures. Download would take quite a lot of time and it would take a lot of space of your hard drive. It is not that 10GB+ games are not enough, this would exponentially increase the storage requirements, as well as memory need for games. Although 10 to 20GB doesn’t sound like much in the era of 1TB platter hard drives, most gamers are using SSDs as their system drives nowadays, pushing the storage cost much higher.

If tablets can have 2560x1600 resolution on 10-inch screens, then why shouldn't we run games on 30+ inch 3840x2160, 4K monitors?

History teaches us that there is always a need for crisper screens, higher resolutions and more pixels, so 4K gaming is definitely the future. We’re not sure 3D and 4K go well together, as 3D still hasn’t really happened for the mass market, but we can confirm that 3D over the last 15 years since first 3D gaming glasses got significantly better.

So what’s the holdup? 4K monitors still cost a fortune and prices will remain high for years to come. The transition to 720p and 1080p was incremental, at least in the PC universe, but 4K is a much bigger leap.